Innehållsförteckning för April 2019 från Flying

The National Transportation Safety Board issued an updated “most wanted” list of transportation safety improvements earlier this year. First published in 1990, the compendium is the agency’s primary advocacy tool to help save lives, prevent injuries and reduce property damage resulting from transportation accidents — all noble goals to be sure. The NTSB now releases a new most wanted list once every two years instead of annually as it did in the past to give safety regulators more time to make progress. The 2019-2020 list calls for safety improvements in Part 135 air charter flight operations — notably, the only aviation-specific recommendation to make the cut. Noticeably absent from the list after several years of inclusion is Loss of Control-In Flight (LOC-I), which, according to the experts, “refers to accidents…

A few days ago I met a young man who had just been hired by my airline. He just turned 25 years old, which means he was born in 1994, the very same year I started flying. He’s pretty clearly sharp as a tack, strongly motivated and a hard worker, which accounts for how he got himself to a major airline at such a young age and also what my employer saw in him when they hired him without the traditional requirement of turbine pilot-in-command time. If he stays healthy to age 65, and my airline stays in business and airliners aren’t flying themselves by then, he’ll retire in the year 2059. AFTER A “LOST DECADE” OF BANKRUPTCY, RECESSION AND CAREER STAGNATION, THE MAJORS ARE SUDDENLY HIRING BY THE THOUSANDS…

Tobias Smollett, though not a pilot, pulled off a couple of good things. He wrote novels and practiced medicine in Covent Garden in the 18th century. He pointed out that when one has given his life to a pursuit, his ideas and pronouncements might, in fact, sound arbitrary or inane to the unschooled. Mark Twain said it like this: “An expert is a fellow from out of town.” His opposite is Smollett’s horse in the race: the adept. He’s done it so long, and done so much of it, that he might sound like your dismissible Old Uncle Bob, until you try out his reductive, simplistic ideas. All of us Boy Scouts learned to sharpen a knife. One holds it at a 45-degree angle, and pushes now one side, now…

THANK YOU, PETER Peter Garrison’s column “This Did Not Happen” [February] probably tops my list of the superbly written articles delivered by Flying through the years. Spiced with Saint-Exupery flair, facts are intertwined into a narrative that rightfully identifies the lack of comprehension and ill actions that reigned up front in that doomed Airbus A330. Sure enough, it is always easy in hindsight and sitting in a comfortable chair to point fingers, yet these errors still creep up on us today … and bite hard. Air Asia and Lion Air, amongst others, remind us we must heed the words of the Collins, Morgans and Garrisons of the aviation world. Michael Conroy via email Peter Garrison’s column, “This Did Not Happen,” is haunting, powerful and disturbingly true. When I retired from…

The threat from Axis submarines prowling the East Coast of the United States was scary and very real. Onshore shelling terrorized civilians, but the real low-hanging fruit for the submarines was on the seas. By as early as August 1942, Axis subs had caused the loss of thousands of lives, mainly merchant mariners, and sunk more than 600 ships totaling 3 million tons. Winston Churchill was quoted as saying, “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” Flying enthusiast Gill Robb Wilson, who later became editor and publisher of magazine, saw how general aviation could help turn the tide. The plan was to have private airplanes patrol the coast to spot submarines, which at that time had to spend most of their time on…

The flight lasted all of 11 minutes. It is hard to imagine how such a short leg could be of such rapture, but it was. Credit must be given to the days that preceded the flight, because they hold the key to the distilled delight and might explain the hyperbole. Tampa, Florida, to Lakeland, Florida, is all of 28 nautical miles. Light on fuel and alone, our Cessna CJ1 slung itself off the runway and the 3,000-foot level off was there just as I got the throttles back, the gear up, flaps up, ignitions off and the engine sync on. Clear, smooth and doing a leisurely 190 knots, the destination came into immediate view as the ATIS came up on the No. 2 radio. There was nothing left to do…

For pilots who aren’t satisfied by the current trend of ditching traditional carrying cases for backpacks, Flight Outfitters has introduced a line of stylish and rugged flight bags as part of its Lift product line. The Lift bag shown here ($99.95) is perfect for a headset, iPad, sunglasses and other assorted gear. The bag’s exterior pockets are a great place to store pens or a backup radio for easy retrieval. If you want to carry more, the Lift XL ($149.95) is a laptop-style, soft-sided bag with three interior compartments, one of which features multpile pockets and zippered compartments to store just about anything you’ll want to bring along on a flight. A padded compartment easily accomo-dates two headsets. Flight Outfitters offers Pro versions of both bags that are solid black…

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (KMSP) ranks 16th in the nation for air traffic, a constant mix of airline, business aviation and military airplanes. It’s harried enough to also challenge some general aviation pilots. A great alternative to KMSP sits just five miles northeast, St. Paul’s Downtown Holman Airport. KSTP’s Runway 32 stretches 6,500 feet and is served by the ILS/LOC 32 approach, and offers circling opportunities to the airport’s other two Runways, 27 and 31. Additional approaches are available as well. A. THOSE CROSS RADIALS Before flying this approach, pilots who regularly fly without a GPS or with one that’s not IFR-certified may want to refresh their VOR intercept and tracking skills. They’ll be needed to identify intersections along the localizer like KIKKY, RULDE and HOVIN that pinpoint the IAF…

On July 25, 2006, at Spanish Fork, Utah, the prototype of the Spectrum Model 33 business jet lifted off on a test flight. The 7,300-pound all-composite airplane, powered by two Williams FJ33 turbofans of 1,562 pounds of thrust each, had previously logged 44 hours in the course of 46 test flights before spending seven weeks on the ground for modifications to the main landing gear and the surrounding structure and systems. Immediately after breaking ground, the airplane rolled to the right. The wing struck the ground and the airplane crashed, killing both pilots. Subsequent examination of the wreckage revealed that the aileron controls had been inadvertently installed in such a way as to reverse their operation. The flight control system was mechanical, consisting of pushrods, bellcranks and torque tubes. Such…

Fighting fires in a Single Engine Air Tanker is one of the coolest jobs a pilot can have. You fly fast at a low level, drop stuff out of the airplane and get the satisfaction of doing something that can help other people and/or the environment. But SEAT firefighting requires a somewhat odd combination of piloting experience: tailwheel and turbine. Aspiring aerial firefighters in Georgia have a path to get there. The Georgia Forestry Commission requires at least a Commercial Pilot Certificate, an Instrument rating and 500 hours. Pilots must fly wildfire patrol in a Cessna 182 for at least one year and become certified wildland firefighters before moving on to actual firefighting. The pilots also do a lot of tailwheel training in a Decathlon before moving into the Thrush.…

I haven’t been the same since I totaled my airplane in Telluride, Colorado, last May. Over the past months in these pages I’ve detailed the fears and anxieties that plague me as I try to get back to being the pilot I once was. Caution that exceeds reasonable risk assessment. Fear that grounds me in situations in which I once took to the sky with no reservations. It ain’t fun. At some point there is only one way through: Push the throttle to the firewall. So, I’ve been flying. A lot. Nantucket, Portland, Columbus, Miami, Key West. I force myself to fly in conditions that are viable but that nonetheless make me uncomfortable. The path to recovery started with a flight lesson I took a couple months ago with a…

Thirty-some years ago, when the FAA was actually paying me to go to Griffin, Georgia, and fly Bob McSwiggan’s DC-3, I heard about this larger-than-life guy named Stan Brock. To hear people talk, he was Ernie Gann, Indiana Jones and Mother Teresa wrapped up into one. A famous, handsome, adventurous Brit living like a monk, giving up considerable fame and fortune to help the indigenous Wapishana tribe in southern Guyana? C’mon! But I’d learn Stan was the real deal and his brainchild — Remote Area Medical — was flying relief missions in a DC-3 owned by my friend Mike Hogan, on loan to Stan for just that. Nearly 30 years later, it (and other airplanes) are still on loan to RAM. Later, when I slithered (yeah, with a few scars)…

In 1945, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, precursor of NASA and source of much of our knowledge about practical aerodynamics, published a hefty compendium of airfoil data, NACA Technical Report 824, which later appeared in book form under the title Theory of Wing Sections. The names of the authors, Abbott and von Doenhoff, have become household words wherever airfoils are regularly discussed at the dinner table. TR 824 presented, in the form of graphs, the characteristics of a great many airfoils as measured in wind-tunnel tests. Airplane designers and would-be designers would pore over these graphs, alert to subtle differences that might make one airfoil more suitable for a particular design than another. To these aficionados of things round in front and pointed in back, airfoils had distinct personalities:…